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The word 'incentive' is defined as a ‘positive motivational influence’. The purpose of this post is to explore the different kinds of user behaviour that can be encouraged with incentives. Although this will hopefully include links as a helpful byproduct, the advice focuses more on increasing user interaction and engagement.

Coming up with the right SEO answer is just one part of improving your website's performance online. The strategy you devise then needs implementation and, more often than not, project management. The purpose of this post is to share what I (and a few others) have learned about managing SEO strategies over the years. There isn't much hardcore SEO though- I suggest you take a look at this if you want some of that!

The inspiration for this post came when I was chatting with a recently graduated friend of mine who'd been looking for work online. Much like myself when I graduated with that all-purpose English Lit degree, she was looking for copywriting jobs online. Before I started at Distilled I did a bit of freelance writing so I knew exactly where she was coming from. Out of curiosity, I decided to have a poke around craigslist and gumtree- a couple of regular haunts of mine about 18 months ago. The very first thing I noticed was that the vast majority all of the writing jobs mentioned SEO, if not in their title then somewhere in their description. I don't remember it being like that all.

When I talk about 'niche blogs', I mean blogs that are regularly updated and focus mainly, but not exclusively, on a certain subject area like, for example, crocheting or tea. More often than not, a blog with a specialty will be of a much higher quality than your average 'rambling and musings of x' site. However, with a zillion new blogs published per hour, it's getting increasingly difficult to ferret these quality blogs out, particularly if they're not in the business of being found. That makes it sound like I'm talking about underground crochet blogs. I'm not. I just mean blogs that aren't particularly well optimised for the search engines and don't know an awful lot about things like title tags or keyphrases.

The aim of this post is to describe a few of the ways SEO agencies (or, indeed, in-house SEO's looking for more budget from the boss) can use SEOmoz to pitch and close SEO projects.
We use SEOmoz at several different stages in our sales process.
Pre Sales
A customer rings up and says 'I want to rank first page for bicycle shop'. While t...

Although a lot of a blog's success comes from the ongoing effort you put into growing and nurturing it, there are a few things you can do to give it the best possible chance from day one. The checklist below varies from very simple actions through to big decisions and longer term strategies.

I was recently working on a social media strategy for a popular city newspaper and it got me thinking about the benefits a business can get from a well-thought out crossover between its offline and online presence. I've tried to write this post so that it's useful for any sized business that has some kind of offline presence, from a shop, through a publication to any kind of offline advertising or PR. If you're spending money offline, you should consider how that investment can be taken advantage of online.

Good presentation skills are essential in the SEO industry. As well as the multitude of conferences that feature so prominently in our industry, we are also often called on to present SEO clearly (and favourably!) to potential clients and skeptical CEOs.

After Obama's inauguration speech last week, a lot of attention was paid to his speechwriter, Jon Favreau. Listening to Obama and reading about how he and Favreau wrote the speech got me thinking about how we use language when writing for the web. I spent some time analysing Obama's oratory and reading about the subject.

Yeah, that's a good point. I think it all comes down to what you want out of the relationship. If you're just after link juice then sure, a blog that's so poorly optimised it's nigh on impossible to find is probably not worth the effort (although these dedicated blogs often have stronger pages than you'd expect, even with terrible on page stuff).

Even so, a niche blog that has a good community is worth pursuing for the other two reasons I list: traffic and expertise.

The other thing to bear in mind is that a blog might be hard to find for reasons other than poor SEO like, for example, unfamiliar keyphrases.

Thanks Joel. It's interesting you should bring those two models up together. In the session, the GOER model was actually offered as a replacement of the old "tell people what you're going to tell them, tell them, then tell them what you told 'em" technique. The idea was that your GOER presentation should be SO engaging, there'd be no need for any kind of repetition. Jury's still out for me though- I'll definitely be paying attenion to style at the next conference I go to to see which technique I prefer. March 25, 2009

Great post Duncan. You're so right about balancing the creative with the management side of things- reinventing the wheel may be fun, but doing it again and again means you never get on to inventing one of these babies.

Having said that, I'm not so sure I signed up for this:

"In a small and growing company it is very tempting to do anything for anybody that asks for it."

Cool- looks fascinating. I'm going to sign up for a test account right after this.

I had a watch of the video and it does say that URL's will be returned with the 'answer'- I wonder why they weren't with the Bush query. My immediate reaction to not being offered a range of sources was negative. I think I'd find it difficult to trust the answer without the chance to verify it quicklty elsewhere- an ingrained part of my search behaviour I expect!

Also, I was wondering how it responds to badly written questions. Part of the charm of a google query is you can just (sort of) throw words at it and then access the damage for yourself.